Happiness Requires Character

Maybe you won’t know your happiness until old age

Ocean Vuong’s interview was searing. His words were skinless. His answers to the interviewer’s questions were as if he had wrestled an angel or two to get them, and maybe he had.

Happiness was the focus of the May 4, 2025, New York Times Magazine issue. I don’t know if Vuong’s story was supposed to be about happiness. Maybe it was simply a demonstration of happiness, the beauty offered to a reader by a writer and a subject, and the gift available in banal media in banal circumstances.

Vuong’s conversation about leaving his social class struck me. His mother was illiterate, and he did not read before her to avoid showing off his education. He was the son. She was the mother.

It would have been a great sacrifice for me to hide reading from my parents. They took pride in my reading. I read prodigiously, and there were books on bookshelves in our home.

I’ve learned many things from books, but I struggle with the cultures we don’t know. An acquaintance and I were chatting away on a long car ride. She took pride in the job she had retired from, had had that job for many years, a good job, she said, for someone without a college degree. Her sons had maintained steady incomes without college educations and had helped support their families.

I was surprised. “I thought if you wanted something, you went after it,” I said. My parents were both the children of immigrants, and it was my duty to do better than they did, to take advantage of opportunity, to find the opportunities. But that was an assumption I made.

“If you are working class, like we were,” she said, “it is difficult to find a good job.” She lived in a subsidized elder apartment and had limited her life choices to fit within her budget. She thought the rich did not deserve their place, nor did she deserve hers, but it was the way the world worked. We have assumptions. We don’t know what assumptions others don’t question. She volunteered for the homeless and engaged in other social justice issues supported by her church. She would describe herself as happy.

I read the New York Times May 4 issue and went down the internet rabbit hole of reading some Aristotle on happiness, reading about positive psychology, and the U-shape of happiness. According to recent researchers, we are happier when younger, which steadily decreases through middle age and then rises again after age 50. Aristotle said we could not know if we were happy until old age. I thought that was poppycock when I was younger, but I believe it now.

When I was done facing major decisions — what would my career be, who would be my marriage partner, and how would I have children — I was happier. Decisions aren’t either/or; they evolve in the stutter-step of living.

I had a biological son without marriage, and I adopted a very challenging child. I had yearned for motherhood and welcomed the empty nest.

Those years of struggle were difficult. They contributed immensely to my happiness later, not at the time. My career contributed to my sense of merit and accomplishment, although it had challenges.

A relationship I engaged in for ten years, starting at age 54, created the narrative that I loved and was loved, a narrative that continued after his death. It was far from a perfect, either/or relationship.

I had known him when I was an angsty 20-year-old, but it was too soon. The challenges we wrestle with increase our character, even if the outcomes aren’t what we want. Twenty or thirty years later, they are part of a longer story.

The political reality is that the next four years will be a shit show. In those magazine articles about happiness, one story talked about the external community contributing to happiness. The Scandinavian countries’ communitarian foci demonstrate this, as does the steady fall of the United States’ general happiness ranking.

So, how are we to survive? Especially we who are Americans? The Buddhists talk about loving-kindness. Friends email me about the next demonstration, protest, who to call, and what to say.

I look to those who demonstrate the character I respect. Character is a mommy and daddy to cling to — whether it is a writer, an editor with high standards, a politician with courage, an organization doing the right thing with its membership, or strategic actions implemented.

I spent my life trying to do the right thing, and I am hunkering down now. I walk. I stop and smell lilacs. I look for the ospreys above the river. I spend time with my grandchildren. My velcro cat looks to me for comfort.

I am not as mobile. I don’t want to discomfort myself, endure the pain of long marches, or stand for a long time. I prioritize comfort over sacrifice, like my cat, seeking the sunbeam. I bless others who sacrifice. I can do small tasks and errands for others.

If I follow any “ism” anymore, it is pragmatism. I look for practical, positive outcomes.

What is happiness? It’s an inside job, but it’s also an outside job.

We have to job-share.

Namaste.